The death of text.

[jfz9580m]

50. Not to butt in

But apparently it is true. I was surprised too..

https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-voters-struggle-signatures-cast-mail-ballot-problems-2024-11?op=1

https://fortune.com/2024/11/07/gen-z-voters-basic-skill-signing-names-vote-counting-chaos-election-official/

Gen Z voters who struggle with cursive could slow the vote count, Nevada's secretary of state said.
He said more mail ballots have been rejected because of issues with young voters' signatures.
Many schools stopped teaching cursive in 2010, leading to a generation unfamiliar with the style.
As more schools stop teaching cursive handwriting, fewer young people have distinct signatures — and that could affect Gen Z voters as they try to cast their votes.

Gen Z is also apparently worse at deciphering disinfo :-/.

https://phys.org/news/2023-06-misinformation-susceptibility-online-gen-millennials.html

I am with you. I am also not into generation wars for either direction - this is only interesting as a potential indication of what happens when societies devalue education and invest less and less in it. Especially when such societies are also awash in junk filled social media and other brain rotting stuff. I don’t have a point about youth versus wisdom or tech versus Luddites.

My point is that a lot of the content I have seen people devouring is truly this low quality, brain rotting crap. And it is available at your finger tips. These are not quality, useful respectable services bought to you by useful tech often. It is low info, junk food for the brain. Idiocracy’s “ow my balls”.

I waste time skimming stuff too. I do not retain much and end up having too many tabs open. But at least the basic material I read is okay. It does bother me that I do not retain much unless I actively exert myself -it is a waste if you don’t retain stuff. But it is not low quality material at least.

But the few times people have shown me the stuff they watch on TikTok, I have found it appallingly unwatchable. I don’t know how anyone consumes large volumes of that crap. And yet I see people stare at their phones with glazed eyes looking almost zombified.

I do feel tech is making us stupider

That is not a criticism of these young people so much as of the system they are stuck with. My general impression is that we treat educators like crap and so why wouldn’t education suffer? And of course that gives the children of wealthier parents advantages that exacerbate inequality.

And I also don’t doubt that this constant stimulation media environment is brain rotting. It has definitely made me stupider on the whole . As I said, it is not really good for long term retention, focus etc.

I actually went ahead and invested in a printer a few years ago and have found it worth it..


One of my favorite tech critics has written about it. He articulated the sense I had when I would look at that stuff-a disorienting sense that irrelevant garbage and meaningful info were casually jumbled together:

https://www.roughtype.com/?cat=21